What's the most important component in a self-driving car? The driver, a top executive at Ford said recently.

Jim Buczkowski, the director of electrical and electronics systems at Ford Research and Innovation, and a Henry Ford Technical Fellow at the automaker, said that the company is "looking at the impact" of future autonomous vehicles.

But, he said, of equal importance is establishing a rapport between the car and the vehicle  both in a case where emergency conditions force the vehicle back into the hands of the driver, but also establishing driver confidence that the car can act independently and safely.

When Google announced a self-driving car in 2010, the concept shocked many because of the total autonomy that Google had built in to the vehicle. But, if viewed on a sliding scale, many cars already have some degree of autonomy: Ford's Collision Warning with brake assist already takes control to mitigate a direct impact. Radar-driven cruise control can match speeds with a vehicle ahead, and parking-assist technology in the 2009 Prius and Lexus models parallel park those cars with minimal driver assistance.

It's not that far-fetched to believe that radar-guided collision warnings, lane departure warnings, lane keeping technologies married with a power-steering system could result in something akin to an autonomous vehicle, Buczkowski said. At the Consumer Electronics Show, Audi proposed an autonomous driving mode under stop-and-go conditions. (For more, check out PCMag's interview with Ford CTO Paul Mascarenas at CES.)

"We definitely are looking at the impact that autonomous vehicles will have in the future," Buczkowski said in a recent interview with PCMag. "It's going to come in stages, and it's very logical to see how conditions like freeway driving will be the first place to see that kind of stuff. So the interesting thing about the effort toward autonomous driving is the knowledge that we're building and creating the processing of information, the fusing of sensor information and so on."

Moving toward the concept of an autonomous vehicle is "a journey, and along the way there's a lot of spinoffs on how we can use the technology to augment and improve some of the systems we have today," Buczkowski added.

To date, Nevada is the only U.S. state to set rules for self-driving cars. One of the state's provisions is that a driver must be in the driver's seat, and can't be impaired to the point that he or she cannot drive. That's consistent with Ford's position, Buczkowski said.

"I think Ford's been very vocal on a strong position that a driver is very important, and that we want to  although we work and support the opoportunity for autonomous  keep the driver connected in some way, and not remove the driver completely from the process," Buczkowski said. "Not letting him take control is not our objective. When the car is running and might be in an autonomous mode and so on, we still want to make sure that the driver can take control whenever he would like to take control, or take control whenever he needs to take control. If the autonomous system says I can't handle this, I want to give it back to you  the driver's got to be in the loop, immediately. And immediately in time to make good decisions."

But an autonomous car must make good decisions, too. A car's systems must be biased, so that they never fail to warn the driver of a problem or fail to take action. "You'd rather have a false alert than a missed alert," Buczkowski said.

The problem, Buczkowski added, is that a car that reacts to an emergency might be occasionally, well, wrong. "The problem with a false alert is that it really hurts confidence in the autonomous system. If I slam on the brakes once every hundred thousand miles you drive  just that once and you will lose total confidence in the system, even though statistically you can say that it's not going to happen very often. But boom, it shakes your confidence."

Ford is doing a "lot of work and testing to establish that confidence," Buczkowski said.

About the Author

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, require... See Full Bio

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